Monday, August 29, 2005

Katrina at New Ruskin College

For example if there are $30 billion of insured losses how much money will be deposited into the accounts of the crooked underwriters and insurance company executives and their bag men, the corrupt insurance adjusters and their contractors?

Let’s see. 80% of the claims will be adjusted honestly so that amounts to what, $15 billion of the losses? Most claims are small. (This is true in health insurance also. The president of Blue Cross said that 90% of his claims were under $2,000. (There are implications for our public policy discussion of health care which I will not be able to go over with you.))

So who will get the remaining 20%? The other $15 billion? Who do you think? Many of the smaller companies will assign these files directly to the adjuster. This is the first clue.

And the take? 10%? $1.5 billion in fraud. $750 million to corrupt underwriters and executives who assign the files, and the other $750 million to the adjusters who “document” the loss. This is the second clue. These adjusters will report work schedules which would require them to work 26 hours a day inspecting losses. How do they do it?

Their contractor “friends” “help out.” In Los Angeles I was surprised to learn how many Canadian contractors had immigrated to the United States. Then I realized that they had “come down from the North like wolves” with their “friends” the Canadian adjusters. Thereby the unpaid tax subsidized the claim operation, (resulted in an increase in the earnings of the adjusters).

The insurance companies used the Canadians because they did not have to take withholding taxes from their payments. Independent contractors. Nor did the Canadians report the income to the Canadian government either. (see The IRS and the Illegals from the North at the Moynihan)

And soon they will all be meeting again in Louisiana. GAB Robins, Crawford and Company, all the adjusting companies. Recall for example that Frank Blaha when not harassing me had an adjuster who was given the wind damage claim for a hospital in the Marianas. An adjuster in Concord California given a file in the Marianas Islands? Don’t ask me, ask Mr. DeLay, or that colleague of his, the one that was just indicted.

Now, some may say, ‘well, see here if this is bad as you say surely there must be someone in the insurance companies looking out after things.’ Perhaps now is the time I should explain reinsurance to you? You see if the claims total more than a sum certain, say $500 million for a company like Farmers for example, that means that after paying out its $500 million the reinsurance company pay everything else, including the corruption. Not much of an incentive to be watchful is it?

(Even in normal claims handling the companies have not done their due diligence. Have you never wondered at the body shops being raided by the police? The charge? They were defrauding the companies. Where were the adjusters? That is just the point. The companies now simply pay the body shops without adjusters at all. They have turned it all over to the police, i.e. cost transfer to society, for again, the premiums have all been adjusted, upward, to protect the companies. (And please don’t think the insurance departments are looking out for your interests. They are not.))

Then you might reasonably suppose that the Names at Lloyds will then look into the loss of $1.5 billion. Ah, the Names. They are not what they used to be. Many are in over their heads. Then too just think about our previous lessons. Class, what have we learned here at New Ruskin about market allocation of costs? Yes, Yvonne.

Counselor: The market redistributes all costs through the price mechanism.

So this corruption, this is not the first time is it? The corruption it turns out like taxes, and energy, etc. is just another cost of doing business. The corruption tax has already been collected in the premium. The Names are protected already.

Yet still, they could save $1.5 billion if only . . . if some how . . . but how? That is the question. Possibly some Names might try and band together to demand that Lloyds or . . . or . . . well who? That is the question. The State of Louisiana? They could teach the adjusters a thing or to. Oh, oh, wait a minute, I know, the IRS!

Oh, no, remember I tried that and the IRS gave my name to the very company they had asked me to assist them in “investigating”?

We could tell the President! That some illegals from the North are coming into the country illegally . . . ah, no, I don’t suppose he would care about that or for that matter about the $1.5 billion either.

And if he did what could he do? Direct the IRS to . . . what? Consider that for years billions of dollars are being taken year after year and the IRS has never been able to find the money. Now, in the middle of a storm they are going to go after the very criminals they have helped protect?

No. I do not think the Names are going to find it any easier this time than in any of the other thousands of times that over a billion dollars has been taken from their pockets. Just who do you think is making the assignments? Do you suppose that the honest adjusters are feeding each other files, or does it not sound more likely that the corrupt adjusters will work together? Of course, the corrupt have a common interest, their share of the spoils $750 million.

There will be thousands of jobs created by this catastrophe but do you suppose my phone will ring? Don’t talk to me about free markets, let me instead tell you some truths about your society, and you. For has this corruption not also sprung from the same silence with which you have greeted everything else?

So while this adjuster in San Francisco will be sitting down in front of the KQED building, the corrupt adjusters will be descending on the storm victims.

No Net at New Ruskin College

I previously explained that I have a psychological “glitch,” a tendency to stay too long with things, situations, watching, waiting to see what happens, collecting data, analyzing, hypothesizing possible explanations.

For example I stayed with Marlene for 19 years when arguably we should never have been together in the first place.

Or, for example, I went back to see Yvonne a second time, (a 2nd time!), after she had conspired with her “friends” at KQED, had betrayed Marlene and me, had continued to lie to me for months afterwards, how stupid is that, encouraging me to listen to Garrison Keillor’s program and his little messages . . .

And after the Red Comedian made his little witticism I continued, about my sister Susan and what . . .? Something about Zen. Zen? Allan Watts lived in Marin . . . what could that mean? Analyze, analyze,

Counselor: (Anal.)

How is that? Yvonne! Please you are not allowed . . .

Counselor: Oh, . . . I forgot.

It is your parentheticals that caused all of this ----

Counselor: Yes, yes it is all my fault.

I am too patient.

You see I have to be very careful. Mustn’t jump to conclusions . . .

Being an insurance adjuster was very agreeable. Collecting information, analyzing the data, preparing reports, offering considered judgments . . . and I got to meet people. And I met people under the most extraordinary circumstances. I would often check them into a motel ---

Counselor: . . .

Ah, after their homes burned down, or something . . . or in the hospital . . .

I met people from all walks of life. The doctor who had just rear ended someone----

Counselor: See!

Please Yvonne. People hit crossing the street. Or people who had just hit someone crossing the street. In Oakland. At 2 am. Drunk.

I met people all across the country . . . but I digress . . . so I thought to go to a Zen center in Marin where I thought Allan Watts may have visited, Green Gulch Farm. After I went back to see Yvonne the second time after a year, one Sunday morning five different people came up to me and made some reference to something I had said to Yvonne.

I wrote a letter to Reb Anderson the Abbot. Then a few days later attending a class at Green Gulch it occurred to me that the class was strangely quiet. Reb Anderson entered the room and sat down, a moment of silent meditation, then looking around, commented: “I sense some tension in the room . . .?”

Oh, no, I didn’t jump to any conclusions! I never do! Collected more data, test the hypothesis.

In the letter I quoted Yvonne’s comment about Green Gulch during its period of “trouble.” Mr. Baker the then “Abbot” had in Yvonne’s words been “fucking all his dominant females.” Monkey consciousness. I also pointed out the stories about Green Gulch as described in Zen in America. For example, there was the story about Jerry Brown, then the Governor of California having drinking parties at Green Gulch and the “Head of Practice” being tasked to pick up the Mumm’s champagne bottles that were strewn about the place.

This was my thinking: Some of the inmates of Green Gulch seemed to know what I had said to Yvonne, yet they were not willing to come forward. Why? I know, I’ll write to Reb Anderson, the Abbot, and see what happens. Collect more data. . . . Sounds like a good idea?

There was dead silence in the class. Reb Anderson looked around.

This was before, years before, David Horowitz wrote his biography where he mentions the Bay Area and Green Gulch Farm, and describes how Mr. Brown the “Abbot” “gave refuge” to Huey P. Newton and aided his flight to Cuba to avoid drug charges. Horowitz reveals in Radical Son that Newton, in route to Green Gulch Farm, stopped on the Bay Bridge and dropped a revolver into the bay which he had just used to kill an 17 year old prostitute, the same gun which had earlier been used to kill a police officer.

In other words the Green Gulch Farm inmates gave “refuge” to a cop killer, who ‘ran’ prostitutes, and had recently killed one, just a few hours before, dropping the gun in the bay before joining them in his flight to Cuba; they also had sponsored Jerry’s drinking parties; they covered up Mr. Browns sexual troupe, his malfeasance, betrayal of the Dharma; and thus his betrayal was their betrayal for they kept silent, covered up, acquiesced in the abuse. (Rule one of all cults: never criticize the cult.)

And Reb Anderson looked around the stony silence of the room, left right, (he also has a photographic memory, (memorizes everyone’s name so he can call on any of the 50 or 100 students, by name)), “ . . . what’s going on . . .? . . . is there some tension . . . ?”

Silence.

And Reb Anderson had himself made some references to what I had said to Yvonne; which I had made supposedly in private to her alone. For example, months earlier two inmates had been talking to each other but in my presence, for me to hear (?), “I think it is so pathetic to have to pay someone to listen to you . . .”

Next I saw Yvonne I related their conversation and admitted the truth, it is pathetic isn’t it?

Then the next week Reb Anderson speaking to the group at Green Gulch commented that “every relationship costs something.”

I was very enthusiastic. Ah! We have a relationship, Yvonne and I! A “relationship.”

But this is what I mean. I collect data. I watch. Don’t want to jump to conclusions.

Everyone was silent. No one had anything to say.

How could I have supposed that anyone would come forward? The first time I visited Green Gulch I attended a “meeting” of the ‘Alan Watts Society’ with two Zen “priests” or a “priest” and his butt boy. (see Lecture Notes: 07-06-05 Mill Valley ) They were from the “Hartford Street Zen Center” in “the Castro” of San Francisco.

Because they are “Gay” they have a right to lie, organize harassment, torment, destroy another’s life. Or if one is “radical” or if one has seen the “truth” or Dharma, or if one is a member of any other subject class, Jew, Woman, Black, or Green, Third World, any of the aggrieved, one has the privilege, permission, “right” to twist justice to his aims, his ego’s satisfaction.

Indeed, all you really have to do is get angry. Consider for example the anger against AIDS and the demand that the scientific method of double blind experiments be abandoned and the “treatments” be given directly to those in need. This policy, enacted in anger and frustration, has now been dropped.

Why? Has the anger all gone?

Some day we will return to “contact tracing” for contagious diseases, or rather for AIDS, the only contagious disease we do not use contact tracing to fight. Why the only disease? Oh, righteous anger.

Next consider, dear reader, how many have died for want of a scientifically tested treatment, in want of contact tracing? How many have you killed? What? Oh, you object to that pronoun? Your silence does not make you complicit in those deaths either. Oh. How very lucky you are. It seems you can never be held to account for anything. How I envy you your rationalizations, . . . of course, I mean I envy your reasons! Yes, yes of course. Have it your way.

So yes I have this glitch. I spent too much time collecting data, making sure, I didn’t want to accuse Yvonne wrongly. Or Marlene. Or any of you, sitting there in stony silence.

Then too I was mistaken from the first. I thought this was just happening to me. I imagined that there was some justice elsewhere. That you were treating each other differently, possibly when I was out of the room.

There was “refuge” for Huey P. Newton, who had, just hours before killed a 17 year old prostitute in Oakland, the place where I had helped people whose houses had just burned down or who had just been in a car accident, but there was no refuge for me. Huey P. Newton was aided by the Zen Center, the cop killer was helped to escape justice, but not one person came forward to tell me what they knew about Yvonne or the others.

They let me know that they knew. Not unlike so many in the media who have over the years let it be known that they knew about the burglary, the many times my employers were persuaded to let me go. I concluded that at Green Gulch the motivation may have been to tell me that they thought it was ok, that they had considered it and did not think it wrong for Yvonne to betray me, or for Michael Weiner to burgle my notebook (see Stolen Notebook at the Moynihan).

They had considered it all and they thought it was fine. (And this may also have been my sister’s motivation. The San Francisco painter wanted me to know she too thought it just.) And the class at Green Gulch, the stony silence, they too thought it just.

No one came forward. And even then I hypothesized that it was still just me! I conjectured that I was caught between the Leftists, like the friends of Huey P., on the one side and the Rush Limbaughs on the Right. But this too has been shown to be false. Null. No, not just me.

Jumpers at New Ruskin College

Better to ask: Why didn’t they jump sooner? What kept them hanging on so long?

No doubt they had some story they were telling themselves. The firemen will come. A long ladder? Helicopter.

As I look back at my life there is an astonishing since of release.

Oh! God! It wasn’t just me . . . after all?

I too had a series of stories which served to explain the world for me. All this must be because when I was nine years old my teacher told my mother that I am retarded. This explained why the students made fun of me at school. “You were held over? Are you a retard?”

And this also explained my brothers and sisters. It explained everything. The universal explanation. I got my first pair of glasses when I was fourteen. My brothers and sisters regarded this as a great embarrassment. What’s wrong with him? And my parents? It must be me again, I let them down early on.

When things started going badly with Marlene, and though we had been together 19 years, for years I thought, this must be because of me. I assumed it was just me.

That is how life is for me. What can you expect? You are retarded!

Whenever things get difficult my mind always wonders back to my earliest memory of trouble. ‘Your teacher says you are retarded.’ All life was judged against this fundamental fact. This was the explanation for everything.

Of course, it is clear now that if the other children had not ridiculed me for being a year older they would have ridiculed me for something else. My brothers and sisters would have been the same no matter what.

Marlene was following her own course quite independent of me.

It is as though the world had been veiled from me by my explanations.

I created this constant excuse for it. They appear harsh, cruel, obnoxious, but it must be because I am retarded or something?

Now the veil is drawn away. This is how they really are. It has nothing to do with me.

For example, I always felt that there must have been something in my letters which caused Yvonne to betray me, for the people at KQED to inveigle Yvonne to bring us down to their studio. Something that I had written with which they disagreed. Or the way I wrote?

It must be me. Something I said.

NO, fool. Nor the Last Letter neither. Nothing. Nothing I did, nothing I said caused these cretins to harasse me.

Whew, what a relief.

I simply attracted their attention. One person heard something, said something to someone else. They had no arguments. There was no reason. Nothing. Word got around. And then when I criticized Yvonne in the Last Letter it was not the criticism, it was just the additional attention which it had created.

One thing led to another and fifteen years later . . . Michael Weiner, Don Imus . . .

There is nothing that I did. This is just how life is. People are like that.

From the beginning to the end.

Cruel. Stupid. Vulgar.

I had always thought of some explanation. I always looked for some reason. Something about me. Something that I did. The way I relate, or don’t, with people. Searching for some clue to explain what is going on. And if your own thought process is brought into doubt, as mine was at the age of nine, you always have to search yourself, double check what you are doing, what you are thinking.

Watching yourself once, twice, even three times. For how do you know that after you have double checked yourself you should not check again? Remember you are retarded. It must be me. Always searching for some reason, some story to explain what is happening. Why are things going badly? For it is when things are going badly that we search for explanations. When things are going well we tend not to inquire very deeply into the causes. Will except good fortune if only due to luck.

Now I see the world for what it is; without explanation or reason or theory.

Emptiness.

But I will not strike out at the world. I will demonstrate how not to strike out blindly, for how would you know when to stop? When would you have done enough killing? 3,000 in the WTC? Is that enough?

This is one of the problems with the President’s “kill them over there so we do not have to fight them over here.” If you have no strategic goal in mind, no professional military plan, no aim other than just to “kill”, how will you know when you have killed enough?

Killing people is not a very effective way to create social change. (That is not what the military, war, is all about.) Killing just confuses the dumb bastards even more than they are, makes them even more emotional, irrational, moves them even further away from reason.

I will kill just one person to show you that I have seen through the veil, this is not me. I have been singled out, Weiner followed me, obsessing on me, harassed me for years, Imus, Mrs. Jack Swanson joined in, and thought they were tormenting someone. What fun! They thought I existed.

When Michael Krasney called me at the AAA Auto Club he thought I was on the other phone. Ron Owens rejoiced in humiliating someone he thought was me.

And they have all been mistaken. And all the rest looking on, adding their jibes, they thought they were taunting someone, or not, thought that they were letting someone be destroyed . . .

I will show you all that you have been confused. There is nothing here. Watch.

For years I was like you are now. I thought that there was some reason or explanation. There is nothing. Watch.

Emptiness VIII at New Ruskin College

We have seen in things both large and small, near and far, the consequences of the simian’s willingness to tell pleasing lies to each other.

The “channeled quickness” (E. O. Wilson) of our minds allows us to double back in our arguments, in a single breath contradict ourselves, without pause to notice. One illogical, self serving, irrational thought follows another in an apparently random manner.

Rationalizations piled up around the ego for its self protection in a hostile world, more than for any political philosophy, or search for truth. For who among us could remain sane if he knew, as George Eliot put it, the sound of the beating of every heart? She concluded that we are all of us, luckily, thickly wadded with our ignorance.

No doubt, perceiving this and its consequence, a confused public discourse, many have simply given up on reason, logic, even self awareness in their grab for power. These are the people who, when they seek political power and have access to the mass media, are what I have called fascists. Their very act of “giving up,” is their bad faith.

Like Iago, the fascist makes an artful grab for power, manipulating ignorance, egotism, the ready willingness of the victim to believe that which is convenient to the ego. In play after play Shakespeare arranges for the good and honest to debate the clever and wicked with princes and the noble sitting in judgment. Almost always the dishonest arguments of the wicked are victorious over the just. The master playwright understood the power of words when marshaled in arguments to defeat truth.

In politics we find hidden behind the high sounding phrases and appeals for compassion, selfishness, masquerading as humility and decency. For without the truth test of the market, the requirement that one actually give up something for what one professes, how do we know who is true and who is false?

In example after example we have seen how the selfishness of the few, twists their reason, and by means of the power of the state they are able to funnel to themselves the advantages which except for that state action would flow to others. We have noted in these transactions that there is an association here of the Left with the oligarchy and we have wondered at this coincidence.

Politics makes strange bed fellows but why these two, The Left and the oligarchy?

The reason can be found in the fact that the Left has an ideology which justifies its meddling in the market, even proclaims the superiority of their meddling over the market. This ideology is supported by a series of false propositions all of which share the failure to accept the consensual associations of mutual benefit which are at the foundation of the market.

The market rises up out of the sea of lies and dishonesty which is the human condition. The market replaces the waves of disingenuous arguments with the rock of a medium of exchange, thus making economic calculation possible. Replaces false words with genuine acts and goods, which can be counted. Allows each to decide for himself what is “best” and “good” and what is “worth” and what is “worthless.”

But the Left accepts none of this and is antagonistic to the market and would replace the judgments of the consumers with the judgment of the leaders of the Left.

Now, who else besides the Left wants to escape the market? Well nearly everyone. We would all like to have things arranged differently for our own convenience. Why slave meeting the consumer’s demands when by a simple act of Congress all could be made “right”? But what can we do?

Then too most of us recognize that though we might personally benefit from a reorganization of the market, if it were done just so, we would most likely all lose in the expected fight as each of us sought some special privilege or favor from the bribed and dissolute Congress. In general the middle class recognizes that the market represents the most advantageous method of distribution.

But this recognition is not universally held. The oligarchy sees no particular benefit in ‘meeting the needs of the consumers.’ ‘Who are they to us? Why should they be given such importance? Better that they consume what we tell them,’ says the oligarchy to itself.

It is generally supposed that the rich are friends of the market for this is what they profess at every opportunity. This is not true. The rich would escape the market if they could. Wouldn’t we all? Ah, but the means are lacking. But not for the rich. They have means.

Also they know better than most that in the competition of the market they might lose. And they know too that they have much more to lose than most. Where as the market protects the middle class from the predation of the rich; for the rich the market acts as an impediment.

When the rich want to raise the rent who says ‘NO!’ ?

Answer: The market.

It is the market which stands between the rich and the savings accounts of the middle class.

So perceiving this obstacle to their ambitions the rich unite and form the oligarchy and look around for supporters and allies to harness the power of the state to their ambition of overturning the market, and removing this impediment to their privileged desires.

And looking around the political landscape they eye the conservatives, defenders of the market, . . . no, no good there, . . . and looking further they perceive . . . THE LEFT. For does not the Left also agree that the market is “unjust” or at least so they say they believe, but who really knows? Does not The Left prefer the power of the state over the market for reasons of “social justice”, or so they say? Yes, yes.

And so the political alliance was formed the Left and the oligarchy.

For example the Ethanol Fraud is a perfect example. The science is that the production of ethanol costs more, uses more energy, destroys, mines, resources to a greater extent than does oil. Yet an alliance has been formed between the oligarchy and the Left environmentalists.

In California Bill Jones, a Republican, threw an election; he failed to run a single ad against Marin Senator Boxer. He even took back out of his campaign the $2 million he had promised. Why? He claimed that he was forced to because all of his reputed $50 million fortune was tied up in his ethanol plants.

Then Left environmentalists who had argued against ethanol changed their positions and joined the Democrats of Californian and advocated ethanol. Mr. Jones’ fortune was secured. Lucky man. Just think of the risk of having all your money tied up not just in an industry utterly dependent on government environmental law, but in one company! Such a lucky man. Oh, he lost the election. The Marin Senator has another six years. The Democrats are so thankful.

Note that the Republican joined with the Left. The oligarchy is ecumenical. The point earlier was only that the Left in particular has a political philosophy that encourages state intervention.

Yet many on the Right can join in the plunder. For example in California the State pays 50% of the cost of photovoltaic panels. These panels are economically inefficient. No one would buy them in such scale if not for the subsidy. Thus the 50%. And who can afford the other 50%? The rich! All tax payers must pay but the rich uniquely benefit. What is the opposite of progressive? Regressive. Yes, Post Liberal.

Recently John Roberts of CBS, (and an Imus regular), was interviewing his “on the road” reporter about ethanol. The man enthused that 50% of all agricultural production in Nebraska was devoted to ethanol. And then acknowledged some had objected on “economics” but with the new dollar a gallon tax reduction, subsidy, “the wind has come out of the sails on that argument.”

Shakespeare would have appreciated the cliché in service to a perfidious end, in political debate. That the tax subsidy, reduction, of a dollar a gallon had no “economic” effect was apparently lost on both CBS “newsmen.” Ethanol is still not economic now even with the subsidy, the subsidy for ethanol was, as with the photovoltaic panels, required because it is not economic.

I am sure many Republicans in California have installed the panels and taken the State’s money, our money, our tax money, which we pay to a greater extent than do the rich because we, unlike the rich, do not have the same ability to raise our prices and offset, pass on the taxes. We all pay but the rich benefit. And I am also sure that many of the farmers of Nebraska are also Republicans. But the intervention in the market is sponsored by the Left, and its meaning is covered up by the Left, by people such as CBS’ John Roberts.

These miss-directions of the market parallel and are part of the misdirection described earlier. The trade unions have secured their public employee pensions, pensions of 105% guaranteed by the government as a growing burden on the people, not because they alone deserve such concessions but because they have joined with the Democrat Party machines to extort the money from the people.

Millionaires have “flood” insurance on their country homes paid for by the people not because they deserve this protection but because they have formed an alliance with the Left. This alliance has secured the oligarchy hundreds of billions of dollars in tax shelters for their “foundations” and “charities” and “institutes” such as the Gallo Brothers' wine institute. And see that the Left does not bother the oligarchy with any oversight. The rich alone can decide how to spend our tax money.

Our tax money? Well of course this is another reason the Left and the rich are so agreeable. For the Left will not accept the idea that the dynamics of the market redirects all cost through the price mechanism.

Every attempt to tax the rich in a free market, i.e. without wage and price controls, will only result in higher prices, inflation, as the rich raise their prices, which they can do because their goods and services are in high demand, unlike yours and mine which are replaceable. Thus the rich can raise their prices to cover the tax and then the Left says, ‘Oh, you can keep that share for your foundation, why it is only fair, after all it is 'your' money.’ And the oligarchy of course agrees once again with the Left.

And we can be replaced by whom? Well by foreign workers for one, either overseas or right here. For the Left and the oligarchy agree on unlimited immigration. Why should the rich have their property held hostage by domestic workers, who might try to raise their prices? Only the rich should be able to raise prices! Let us have open competition; competition for labor, and socialism for the rich!

The top 20% of Social Security recipients have not “contributed” the money they now take out of the paychecks of the people and add to their already substantial incomes of over $75,000. They too have connected with the Left and its claim of “universality.” But universality has nothing to do with the 50% of the income that the top 20% control, not the 60% of the financial assets which they control. No, no universality for any of this, this all belongs exclusively to the top 20%, only the withholdings from the people’s meager paychecks are to be made "universal", here with our money the Left and the oligarchy are all universality.

And this selfishness in our “public” policy is self destructive. If the unions had been more expansive in their lobbying on medical coverage, and opened the discussion up to those groups that all can agree should be covered, victims of accidents, i.e. emergency trauma care, the children, and those with congenital, i.e. uninsurable conditions, the cost of health coverage would have fallen and availability would increase. But selfishness prevented this.

Nixon offered Senator Kennedy a Federal health program but he turned it down, he would not compromise. Then during the Clinton Administration the Republicans again offered an incremental compromise on the Mrs. Billy Clinton proposal for a “single payer” system. The Republicans offered to insure all children but again the Democrat being the champion of the people turned down the compromise. They are such clever negotiators! They will never give an inch. Not on Social Security, not on health care, never! They are so “radical.” And the people suffer for there arrogance.

In our schools technology has not developed because the government bureaucrats have no interest in innovation even though this technology would be a boon to our own children and the world. And similarly in highways we again have seen the Left in league with the oligarchy pour our money into pork barrel highway projects misdirected by government while, for example, electronics could greatly increase both the efficiency of our roads and their safety. But because the highway bureaucrats, like the educational ones, are not paid to improve either, because there are no market incentives, 43,000 die each year on our roads, hundreds of thousands seriously wounded, and nothing can be done because government controls all. And who controls government? Without logic and reason, without honesty, can anyone control? Does it not simply become a base struggle for power in which factions contend to twist the market to their advantage?

We do not, as noted above, regularly make global reassessments of our situation. Who can fight city hall.

Just see how ridiculous I have appeared to you, and to the oligarchs, Imus, Weiner, Imus’ regular Senator Hatch, Senator McCain, all the rest . . . I rose above my place, my class and am destroyed for it. But is not my story simply itself another example for why politics is irretrievably corrupt. Can you not see how all is twisted by this political process?

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Armstrong&Getty at New Ruskin College

Statements like this sound homosexual to me. Because snide, glib, . . . feminine. Women are said to be more verbal, to have greater “social skills”, greater range in their ability to deal with competing social demands, etc.

And homosexuals are said to be more “female” for some of these very same reasons.

But the morning morons on KNEW are not homosexuals. At least they do not trade on it if they are. Ron Owens is another example whose snippy put downs have always made me think Queen. Perhaps he will come “out of the closet” and leave his wife and daughters.

That has become a pattern. The “closet Queen” walks out when they become teenagers. Become an Episcopal Bishop, the son joins the Taliban, or; I’m confusing stories.

I suppose that it is unfair to homosexuals. ?? Or not. Some I think would appreciate their reputation for being able to “dish it” with the best of them. But what does it say about our culture that heterosexuals now compete to “dish it”?

“Well . . . enjoy your failure . . . Don’t you just hate those people who always have some excuse, I’m failing but let me explain why . . . they have a whole explanation for how ‘the system’ is set against them . . .? well . . . enjoy your failure.”

It is like the weatherman on KSFO. It is embarrassing to even acknowledge them. Which is why for years I tried to ignore them. Even after the burglary. I thought someone will come forward and give evidence. You can not cover this up.

Anyway what can you do? The police are part of it. They were following me for months after the burglary, referring to me as the “Colonial Motel Suspect.” And as the years went by they escalated. Michael Weiner, and Ron Owens used Scott “now he probably thinks that I work for the JDL” Bobro at Farmers. Michael Krasney used Rose Guilbault, VP, at the AAA Auto Club. Mrs. Jack Swanson apparently knew the owners of CENCAL, and of course Don Imus had Frank Blaha at GAB Robins.

But Armstrong and Getty do not want to be left out the day I kill myself in front of the KQED building. They will high five each other on air the next morning.

Yesterday, Lee Rodgers was condemning the management of ABC’s WMAL for the firing of Michael Graham. “I would never work there.” Yet not four days before Mrs. Jack Swanson explained on the air that she would use her influence to have Christine Craft taken off the air. (Using her influence. Her husband the station manager.) Why? Craft had called her an “idiot.”

You can get taken off KGO for telling the truth? Mrs. Jack Swanson is an idiot.

What was Lee Rodgers’ point? Was he not by implication asking ‘Who would work for KGO?’ He was expressing his contempt for the cowards, Rosie Allen, Ed Baxter, Gene Burns, Bernie Ward, etc. who knew about the burglary, the years of harassment, and said nothing out of fear of retaliation by management?

Yes. Lee Rodgers and Mrs. Jack Swanson are contemptuous of their cowering colleagues. In other words Rodgers is a hypocrite. He enjoys the protection of Mr. Jack Swanson, even as Swanson keeps Rodgers’ colleagues in fear of their jobs.

Champions “free speech” for the hate filled Graham but does not want the truth spoken about Weiner, Mrs. Jack Swanson, Imus et al.

And so it goes. Is that not what was done to me? Random acts of violence? Anonymously?

But of course they were all indignation that Michael Graham was dropped for his repeated assertion that all Moslems are terrorists, that “Islam is a terrorist organization”, failing to make any distinctions. (We kill terrorists don’t we?)

Indignation about the loss of “free speech?” Glorying in triumph over how these rich powerful people have used their influence for fifteen years to destroy me. Glory? For example in Michael Weiner’s twisted neurotic view it has been a fair fight. How fair? Well, come on, I am Gentile! I am 6’2”. A WASP! Don’t you see that makes it fair.

Don’t you know what those Gentiles did to the Jewish people? And I have blue eyes too. Remember that? Blue eyes! A NAZI! See? And Mrs. Jack Swanson also thinks it has been fair. Why I am a MAN! She is just a weak struggling female. She was raised a feminist. Get EVEN! Before she used her influence at CENCAL she had tried to get Rush Limbaugh taken off the air back in the 1980s. And now Christine Craft.

But of course Rush Limbaugh raised Mrs. Jack Swanson’s fist in a victory pose at a recent event. He will go on for hours, three hours a day, putting it out, ‘Go on do your worst liberals, you can never do anything to us, you know why? Because we are White Males and we can take anything you can dish out, go on do your worst. Because we are stronger, better, smarter, than you, you can never hold us down, you know why because we are White Males. That is right we will just work harder, faster, smarter than you and you will never be able to keep us down , you know why, because . . .’

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,this existence goes. Praise to that happening, over and over!For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,that work is over. Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope, free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw blown off into emptiness. These words I'm saying so much begin to lose meaning: Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: Words and what they try to say sweptout the window, down the slant of the roof.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

COP Suicide at New Ruskin College

Suggestion for suicide research: Correlation between cop suicide and corruption. Cop suicides may be an indicator of corruption in their jurisdiction. What do you do when the “good guys” are the bad guys? Who do you report to? Not everyone is a Frank Serpico.

In my case the President of the United States has taken notice of this web site. Senators have taken notice, some Senators have even taken the side of my oppressors, (Hatch and McCain). Senator Kerry repeatedly went on the Imus show during his campaign. After I applied for a job with the new Governor of California, Mrs. Jack Swanson made a reference to my application. Even the new Governor has someone on his staff who leaks to her.

So where do you go from there?

This is why we should research police suicides. They join to help, to do good, and then they discover what I have discovered, the utter degradation, corruption, of society.

They find that the world is Empty. No truth or justice, just ego, greed, delusion, hate.

Popcorn & The Mob at New Ruskin College

After Michael Weiner began reading from my stolen notebook, and then Mrs. Jack Swanson and Brian Wilson, and Ed Baxter, and the morning guys at KGO, Wigand and Dunbar, I wrote a note to Yvonne about the burglary.

At that time I didn’t appreciate how hopeless my position. I had no chance. This was January 2000. I thought Yvonne would share the note and then as the burglary became public, people would talk, someone would come forward and Weiner would be arrested. Justice would be done.

Now I understand that I am in another class. It does not matter that everyone “knows” that Michael Weiner is a burglar. The rich and powerful are protected. Ordinary schlubs like me have no rights. But I came to realize all of this only later.

Then Garrison Keillor did a thing about popcorn on one of his broadcasts. He had made many comments, references to my letters, and seemingly to Yvonne, (Yvonne had encouraged me to listen to Keillor’s broadcasts), so I wondered if this too was not a reference to the stolen notebook. (see Yvonne’s story at the Stolen Notebook Archive at the Moynihan.) So I included this question in my note to Yvonne: why did Keillor reference popcorn in his broadcast?

A few days later Christine Craft on KGO coughed and apologized that she had choked on a piece of popcorn. But, of course, she never came forward.

Recently she called Mrs. Jack Swanson an “idiot” and encouraged listeners to attend a counter counter protest, (Mrs. Jack Swanson was staging the counter protest, (yes, I know, Northern California politics)). Mrs. Jack Swanson immediately, as soon as her next turn at the microphone, went on the air and condemned Christine Craft for calling her an “idiot” and for encouraging protesters to the counter counter protest and further, she, Mrs. Jack Swanson, would speak to Mr. Jack Swanson, the station manager, and have Christine Craft taken off the air.

And so it goes. Other than that one reference to “popcorn” Christine Craft never came forward. She must have known about the burglary from the other employees of KGO and Mrs. Jack Swanson and Brian Wilson had been talking about it the first Monday following that week Michael Weiner had first begun reading from the stolen notebook, which was less than 24 hours after the burglary.

Craft is an attorney. An officer of the court. And she has helped cover up a felony.

After Yvonne betrayed Marlene and me, after the Last Letter, I wanted nothing more to do with politics. If your life could be destroyed, your privacy violated, complete strangers could organize themselves to oppress you, and for nothing, for writing some letters about laser disks in education, then I chose not to participate.

But that was not enough for Michael Weiner. For years following the Last Letter in 1991, he was following, harassing me. Making covert references. Stalking me. I once caught him in Berkeley. He had followed me from Marin. Weiner is a lunatic. But then Ron Owens and Michael Krasney joined in. Then Imus. Then Mrs. Jack Swanson. Then Imus again. For years this went on, fifteen years.

Soon I will be dead. I tried to get out after the Last Letter. And then even after Weiner and Owens and Krasney, after years and years I tried to go on, to make a life. Now and then I marvel at how optimistic I had been in 1992, trying to start a new life for myself after Marlene. How did I have hope? I have no idea.

And after I am dead no one will know about the time Christine Craft mentioned “popcorn” on the air.

Mrs. Jack Swanson will have Craft taken off the air.

Weiner will harasse and oppress some other target.

People will say of me, ‘He had some kind of problem with Jews, didn’t he? I hear he was anti Semitic. And then there was something about the Bell Curve, wasn’t he a racist too . . . and then he complained he couldn’t find work . . . well who would hire him? He had a web site for Christ sake! All he did was complain. Oh, yeah, I know people like that! Who would want to hire someone like that?’

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Emptiness Part VII at New Ruskin College

Why did Senator Boxer not support a reduction in benefits for the wealthy Social Security “beneficiaries”? Why should ordinary workers, half of whom earn less than $35,000 a year, pay the Social Security of the top 20% whose income is in excess of $75,000? I thought the Marin Senator was on the side of the people? Why not redirect these funds from the rich back to the poor, depositing it into the savings accounts of the poor?

Because she is from Marin. She represents Marin. The rich. This is the Democrat party of today.

Do you think the Marin Senator has carefully evaluated the $109k paid to BART train drivers and reduced the Federal subsidy to mass transit for such union excesses? Of course not the Democrats are the mouthpieces for the unions. We are all of us forced to pay but the funds are doled out my the Democrat machine to the Democrat machine. (And do you suppose that the Republicans stay up nights worrying about this looting? In a word no. They do not care. Indeed they compete to loot for their states an equal share which their party machines can dole out.)

For example, has the Marin Senator carefully examined how Federal highway funds are used by states to subsidize their exclusionary zoning laws? Advocated limits on Federal funds for those who exclude the poor and middle class? Has she blocked Federal funds for cities like San Francisco that have used their zoning powers to down zone their cities? No, no, no.

Does the Marin Senator care that 12% of the wages of people earning less than $35k, (half the people), are being redirected to the top 20% who control 50% of the national income and 60% of the financial wealth? Again, I say, No. (Note too that the top 20% were “paid” back all of their “contributions” in the first few years of their retirement. All the money they now collect is pure profit.)

The Marin Senator does not care about fairness. The Democrat party has formed an alliance with the state and municipal employees to loot the public treasury. In San Francisco, for example, Mayor Brown added 4,000 employees bringing the budget to $5.2 billion. (San Francisco) But this is minor compared to the looting across the nation where the Democrats have systematically plundered the public treasury for votes: “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, major public pension plans paid out $78.5 billion in the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2000. By the comparable period in 2004, that had grown to $117.8 billion, a 50% climb in five years.” (Business Week: Public Pension Sink Hole) Just as we have seen with the national debt, when the Republican stopped slaving to balance the budget the Democrat knew no limit and so thus, $8 trillion in debt, about which Mr. Bush said, it is just “numbers on paper.” (Peter Peterson, Running on Empty, Foreign Affairs)

And see how one lie leads to the next. For the Marin Senator will claim that we have “progressive taxation” which at least adds some fairness to the American system. But of course the dynamics of the market redistributes all costs, raw materials, energy, insurance, and taxes by the price mechanism. Taxation is a burden on the people it can not be made progressive. To the extent prices can be raised to offset the taxes they will be raised. And who then actually pays the tax? The people! (This is why taxes should be kept as low as possible.)

And see here a perfect kind of example of Emptiness. The Right regularly assails us with their triumphalist sneers that “they” pay most of the taxes. ‘See all the income tax “we” pay!’ they cry, failing to see that the taxes follow the distribution of income, let alone seeing that this income results from the ever constant price rises by which the tax is transferred to the people. Yet this myopia is matched by the jubilant cries of “tax the rich” from the Left, Post Liberal, whose smarmy manipulation of the people is matched by their smarmy contempt for the people, for they, of course, fail to point out that as long as “the rich” are free to set their own prices, the attempts to soak, or only tax, them will fail.

Thus both parties compete to mislead the people, and the Emptiness is found in not their dishonesty, but in the even more devastating thought that they are indeed sincere. They actually are as lost as they appear. And we are left to wander around the competing factions, in the dark, hopeless.

The so called “progressive tax” falls not on those who can “afford to pay” but on those who can not raise their prices, (for whatever reason). The classic example of a high earner who can not raise his prices is the “B” list movie star. He is still a movie star and has a high income but knows that the opportunity to raise his price is declining, even the opportunity to get another picture deal is falling. Yet the tax remains high.

And in Ronald Reagan’s time the income tax was real, rising to 91% during the height of “New Deal” “progressive” mania, but still at 72% prior to the Reagan Revolution. And see how this tax applied only to “ordinary” income. Wealth could be protected in tax shelters, in cattle ranch operations, oil and gas, in a hundred schemes created by War Time Washington. The War Raw Material Board, the War Energy Board, etc. created thousands of ways to administer the economy with preference to wealth, old money, not those with increasing incomes. (Kennedy tried to remove these regulations but it was not until Reagan swept through that these taxes and tax shelters were finally removed 35 years after the war’s end. (How much of the “stagflation” of the 1970s was a result of the effects of this massive redirection of the economy by these tax shelters and “redistribution” schemes? The government’s direction of the economy is always to stagnate and diminish opportunity, because of the fundamental dishonesty of the passion play which misdirects all efforts. This is the Emptiness.))

And today income is taxed but wealth is not. Capital gains are taxed, taxed even as ordinary income, but wealth, “patient capital”, is not. And even the “death tax” is now slated for elimination, the only way to tax wealth, unless the deceased had taken the precaution of tucking his capital away into another labyrinth of schemes to avoid taxes.

And note here the dishonesty of the Republicans who decry the “death tax” on the accumulated capital, even though this capital has often been accumulated “tax free” without even the payment of the 15% of the long term capital gains tax. But the American system as should be seen by now is not much concerned with fairness. Both sides contend to get what loot they can pull from the passion play, and fairness is of no concern. That ordinary workers pay taxes all their lives on their meager earnings while millionaires pay not even the 15% capital gains tax is not even on the agenda to be examined.

Yet what is fair about a tax system, for example, that levies the same tax on journeyman plumbers both earning the union rate, if one is 50 and the other is 25? Same income but the first already has bought his home, raised his children, funded his retirement, etc. while the younger one must try to start his family in a country where exclusionary zoning has pushed housing out of the reach of ordinary earners, where college tuition has pulled ahead of inflation, where the “debt bubble” has ruined the currency and the possibility to save, etc.

For practical reasons of administration, the wealth tax need not start until the accumulated wealth has reached the $10 million range, but this simple example has been used so that it can be seen that the fairness of the proposal is that those who have more, more savings not just more income, should pay more, since it can be seen to be fair even for low incomes.

The same market forces that redirect all taxes will also redirect capital or wealth taxes. As long as there is a free market without wage and price controls this is unavoidable. However the unfairness of loading the entire burden on income can be lessoned. For it is just those individuals who are creating wealth, and earning high incomes, but who have not yet accumulated great wealth who are now being heavily and unfairly taxed. These productive members of the economy are just the people we want to encourage. By taxing only income and not wealth we discourage innovation and reward the status quo. And the wealth tax would tend to encourage the productive deployment of capital as the tax will be due whether the capital has been invested or squandered on conspicuous consumption.

Note that the same process of market reallocation will take place with a capital tax just as it does with the current income tax. Capital will leave the country to avoid the tax. Interest rates will rise to attract capital back. The interest will thus be added to the cost of borrowing capital and passed on to you and me in higher prices.

And if you are saying, ‘well, what was the point if we are just going to pay it anyway,’ you still have not understood the first lesson of economics: it is a system of voluntary associations of mutual assent. You can not “take” other people’s capital in our system unless you first establish wage and price controls, i.e. government coercion. Again, the only way to make this proposal “progressive” is not in the tax, not in the “taking,” but as always in the expenditure. For example if the money thus raised were to be put in savings accounts for the poorest workers it would become “progressive.”

These workers would still pay the tax in the form of higher prices but they would uniquely benefit. Everyone would pay the higher interest but the poorest workers would receive the benefit of the individual savings accounts: therefore progressive.

(For example paying for half of the cost on installing photovoltaic solar panels on the mansions of the rich, as does California, is not “progressive”. But see how one lie leads to the next. The ‘Progressives’ will answer that this payment from California to the rich is funded by the rich? ‘Do not the rich pay most of the taxes?’ they will ask, ‘Are we not simply giving back some of what they have “put in”?’ (And this is how most people go through most of their lives, utterly lost.) So the myth of “progressive taxation” encourages and justifies the oligarchy and the misdirection of the economy. Emptiness.)

Note that from an national economic perspective it does not matter if the capital is in the accounts of the rich or in the accounts of workers for their retirement in 40 or 50 years. The capital tax simply transfers the money, at first from the accounts of the rich to these newly created accounts for the poor, and then as the rich demand higher interest for their capital we all end up paying higher prices for this interest.

The point was to spare those with increasing incomes, the most productive of us, from having to collect all the taxes themselves by sharing this onerous burden with those who are already rich. The rich only act as tax collectors for the state, passing the taxes on in their products or services. (The word ‘capitalist’ comes from the Latin for the one who bids for the right to collect the taxes from the provinces. The winner would pay the Senate in Rome and then to the province to collect back his bid, plus whatever profit he could collect for himself. Pilot was the CEO of a capitalist syndicate.)

In the above example, the two plumbers have the same income, and therefore the same income tax, but their wealth is not the same, and therefore their “ability to pay” is not the same. But do not look to the Marin Senators for answers to this unfairness. Nor any other. The Marin Senators stand for unfairness, for wealth and privilege, for the status quo, for Marin, in preference to the people.

But see how the Marin Senator Boxer and Al Franken can have it both ways: Ah politics!

They will cash in those bonds in the filing cabinet in West Virginia! Just as Randi Rhodes, (who Drudge rightly describes as little better than a trained seal with a ball on her nose), says that the tax payer will not have to pay for the pensions that have fallen into the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., because the “insurance” will pay. But who pays the insurance, Randi Rhodes? (http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/business/article/0,1299,DRMN_4_3430985,00.html)

(Drudge’s anger stemmed from Randi Rhodes’ advocacy of criminal trials for journalists who “lie.” (She describes her job, herself, as “filling dead air.”) Yet in the absence of any system of ethics or morality, any shared sense of right and wrong, what alternative is there to the courts and even criminal prosecution? Her logic is that without honor, honesty, all we have left is the courts. This is the logic of Emptiness.)

For example, the airline pilots, who complain that, before they drove their airline into bankruptcy, they had a $90k pension and now they will receive only $35k from their fellow taxpayers, do they have a reputation for concern about the welfare of their fellow workers? Citizens? I think not. I think airline pilots have a reputation for looking out for themselves. Egotistical pricks. And I think their fellows in the ----

Counselor: And you are not?

. . . And I think their fellows in the union ---

Counselor: Your Mr. Bush, The President, isn’t he a pilot?

. . . yes, . . .And I think their fellows in the union ----

Counselor: And your Mr. Rumsfeld? He too is a pilot?

. . . yes, . . . thank you Yvonne.

Counselor: You are welcome.

And I think their fellows in the union movement know this. I think the whole nation knows this. But see how not withstanding this fact, this ‘knowledge’, the pilots are still able to play the role of the righteous who are wronged by the powerful.

(Recall that it was the pilots association that blocked the attempt to strengthen the bulkhead and cockpit door to prevent would be terrorists and hijackers from gaining access to the cockpit and flying the airplane into an office block. The president of the pilots association shouted down the other speaker, shouting “our lives are on the line.” And what of the lives of the people of the World Trade Center, how did their lives figure into the president of the pilot’s association thinking? Their lives did not figure into his thinking. But do you not think this past president of the pilot’s union enjoys his retirement in Tucson? )

Yet in their selfishness and shortsightedness the Pilot’s Union is in no way exceptional. The American labor movement, unlike its European counterpart, was not concerned with “social justice” but with getting as much as possible for its union members, and therefore maximizing their union dues. They followed this “selfish” policy even to their own ruin.

For example German unions have ridden down declining industries by agreeing to work rules and givebacks to allow the firms to continue, prolonging their jobs and the usefulness of the sunken capital, where the American unions have simply driven their firms into bankruptcy. A large part of the union movement’s decline in America has been due to the closing of firms, whole industry groups, rather than allowing a compromise to extend the industry’s life.

Health care is an example of how American unions failed to use public policy and follow the example of the European unions. The American unions did obtain health care for “their” members and shortsightedly abandoned the rest of society. It does not follow that a ‘nationalized’ system need have been the only possibility, yet even so the French, Swedish, German health systems rival and surpass the American system in many respects. Nor is it clear that the American system, with its heavy government regulation and huge insurance bureaucracies even deserves to still be regarded as “private.”

Yet the American labor movement’s abandonment of the “uninsured” and now “underinsured” (with the advent of “limited” policies) has created a skewed payment structure where the cost of the policies rises due to the combination of shrinking consumer volume and the increase in moral hazard.

What if the American health system had been expansive, generous, instead of selfish? For example emergency trauma care is something everyone can agree on, yet the emergency rooms are often unpaid for the emergency care provided. Why? For though it would be a simple matter to divide up the cost of treating the injured by charging the causes of trauma care, e. g. cars, stairs, machinery, bathtubs, even this, something which is actuarially direct and simple to administer eludes us. Why? Because the contending parties refuse to work on their common interest, even as here, where all can agree any of us might be struck down. And one reason for this disunity is that the American labor movement asks, ‘what care we for those other fellows? They are not “members of our union,”’ each staying in his role in the passion play. See that the selfishness arises out of the Emptiness.

In a similar manner other groups of patients could be identified and a cost system developed. For example children do not represent a moral hazard. Underwriters cheer every time one of the little patients has to be dragged kicking and screaming into a doctor’s office. Those are the kind of “risks” underwriters want. And there can be no claim that the babe in swaddling clothes failed to “plan” or take “responsibility” or is trying to “live off of others.” Yet again, medical coverage for patient’s under 18 eludes the best thinkers of our day. Why? Selfishness.

Then too patient’s with congenital defects discovered in their youth can not be said to have shown a lack of prudence. Nor can patients whose policies have paid out their limits. In auto insurance the “uninsurable” can be placed or “assigned” with private insurance companies who provide the insurance coverage paid for under the assigned risk program sharing the costs, fairly. Fairly? If that is important to you. (Or do you prefer to stick these patients with some unsuspecting insurance company? Is that it? Still trying to ‘get over on the man?’ Still trying to soak the rich?) Similarly patients diagnosed with cancer in childhood might still be covered for unrelated medical claims with the “assigned risk” program paying for the detected cancer claim.

With the removal of each of these groups from “private insurance” the cost of the health premium goes down and the number of consumers who can afford the policy goes up, thus is the cost shared with a wider and wider pool of healthy individuals. Yet this happy situation has not developed in America, not because it is beyond our abilities, but because of shortsightedness, meanness, the selfishness of our leaders, in the union movement, in the insurance industry, and politics.

Yet see how the pilots, not withstanding this history of selfishness, ignoring the needs of their fellow citizens, having it both ways, playing their role in the passion play, they are all indignation and moral outrage that, after having driven their airline into bankruptcy, (United is employee owned the unions having forced an ownership position with their prior strikes), as have the steelworkers their steel plants, and as the autoworkers are doing to their auto plants, the tax payers will only pay 30% of their pension! Those selfish tax payers! The passion play’s audience’s appreciation of the pilot’s acting of their role of the ‘wronged’ is in no way diminished by the knowledge that the pilots are themselves the authors of their own misfortunes.

Have you not considered why the airline unions, (and GM’s unions, and Ford’s unions for that matter), did not secure their pensions and medical benefits? How secure? Well, . . . with money. Why not? Because there was no money left. The union movement now represents only 7% of the private workforce because they can only strike, hold for ransom, firms with large capital investments. (Ford has one metal stamping machine which cost $200 million.) Even if the airplanes sit on the ground the payments are still due. Leverage.

The only industries that can be struck are the ones with large capital investments. (Though interestingly silicon chip factories, Intel has plants that cost billions, have not been the targets of labor unions.) Thus held hostage the managements have agreed to terms that have mortgaged the future earnings as current accounts were all committed to wages and other costs. But in the passion play version of this industrial history it is the wicked corporations that have “cheated” the workers not the unions that have picked the pockets of these vulnerable highly capitalized firms and, of course, the public sector where the Democrat eagerly seeks to hand over the tax dollars, for the union’s support, a relationship reminiscent of certain kinds of bacteria floating in stagnant ponds, you know, scum.

Democrats, in good faith, see nothing wrong with this, having it both ways. They stand for every one in every thing never having to say no to anyone. Consider that it was only after the Republican gave up on balancing the budget, and (also having it both ways), started telling us the “deficits don’t matter,” under Reagan in the 1980s, that the debt bubble began to grow. Today we have two parties telling us that “deficits don’t matter.” Two parties having it both ways. (And I guess the national debt does not matter . . . if you die before it comes due. (Leave it for someone else. (The greater fool: your grand children. (Now who is the suicide?))))

Just as Franken can be for “progressive indexing” before he is against it, or for the war in Iraq before he turned against it, (after we were already there), and just as Kerry voted for the funding bill before he voted against it, American politics can be said to be the art of having it both ways. It is not really a discussion, it is a passion play.

For expressing such views I have been harassed and oppressed for these last fifteen years. In 1991 I thought that if only people could see the unfairness, if they could only attribute “bad faith” to my enemies, then justice might be done.

But now I see that it was hopeless from the beginning. There is no way, no religion, no philosophy, to move you. Some may attribute “bad faith,” yet even if they do it may have nothing to do with reason or justice. It would be mere chance or randomness.

Indeed my very act of writing the Last Letter in 1991 itself spurred on my enemies. I am left alone in a vast wilderness. Emptiness.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Emptiness Part VI at New Ruskin College

In any given epoch, moment of time, there is an utter chaos and confusion of ideas. Each individual following his own confused ideas, yet, thinking no doubt that he is following some religion or philosophy, imagining that there is some system to his wild mental gyrations, unexamined prejudices, vainglory, perhaps even going to his grave in the quiet satisfaction that he has in the end “understood.” (Imagine the vanity of even daring to know.)

May this confusion be shown only later, after the evidence is sorted out, the facts carefully examined in centuries of disinterested discussion? But why only later? Perhaps because in the moment of time you will not allow yourselves to engage in disinterested discussion. Will not admit that your own thoughts and methods of analysis are twisted by greed or delusion or hate. Will see this only later. Will you see this later?

Will think, in the heat of the moment, that even the idea of being “disinterested”, the very word “disinterested”, is cold, heartless: ‘MY GOD HAVE YOU NO SOUL? YOU WANT US TO LOOK AT THE CAT SCAN? Don’t you understand that we are dealing with a woman’s life?! And you want us to look at a CAT scan? Are you inhuman?’

Or ‘“strategy?”, men are dieing out there and you want to talk about strategy? Have you no heart, no soul? What care we for strategy, kill, kill, kill them over there so we do not have to fight them here. . . .’

Or, and now looking at the same question from the opposite side, ‘I voted for the war before I voted against it.’

(For example, I was singled out for attack because my letters to the Senate supported the First Gulf War. In San Francisco this is all it took to be marked out for attack and ruin. As Alan Watts noted, there is no one so militant as a pacifist, nor as imperious as an anti-imperialist. And in the Bay Area Women are encouraged to act out against men, Blacks Whites, Gays Straights, Latinos Anglos and peaceniks against “warmongers” and so on.)

That any of these people may be said to have been acting in good faith is irrelevant. We may decide to credit good faith, but the point I wish to make here in Emptiness is that even your attribution of good or bad faith is itself beside the point. Lost in your vanity and ego, the desire to ‘get along with others’, is more important than reason or logic. There is no reason.

Dodge responsibility. For example, being against the war spares the ego from having to accept responsibility for the dead. And yet a moments reflection should reveal that responsibility is not so easily avoided. This is not “your” society? And if awareness of your own culpability still eludes you, then consider how completion of the First Gulf War would have obviated the need for the Second.

(Fifteen years later, those who singled me out for attack, who betrayed me, can now see, that the consequence of leaving Saddam Hussein in power was the Second Gulf War. Do they now say, ‘Oh, sorry, I guess you were right?’; of course not. The mind has no dignity. (Mine included, if I could go on I would.))

There are whole other systems of rationalization that are brought into consciousness. Each sees according to his lights.

And the branches swayed in the warm wind heavy with the scent of the Indian Ocean before it was called “the Indian Ocean.” The sun rose above the morning fog and shown down through the triple canopy rainforests of East Africa where today there is only desert. Our ancestors, their tails wrapped around the swaying branches warmed themselves in the sunlight, and chattered to one another. And today we are still “alive and alert in the vanished forests of the world,” (Dr. E. O. Wilson). Still chattering to one another, still telling ourselves pleasing lies.

This was 60 million years ago. After the great crater in the Yucatan 100 miles across, 30 miles deep, was formed by a meteorite, 65 million years ago. 6o million years of chattering monkeys. (Technically not monkeys but the common ancestors of both humans and modern monkeys. (Dr. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale))

What are your lies compared to this? What is your destruction of me compared to this? Deny the truth, go ahead, who cares? Don’t lift a finger. How very convenient for you that “a just society” seems to require nothing of you.

You have The Power! You can use technology so your chattering and screaming can be broadcast over an entire continent. Heard further, yes, but you are still the monkeys in the swaying trees, telling lies to one another.

And for all of history it has been the same. All of history is manipulated by your vanity and ego so that the story can be told with you always on the side of “the right” and “the just.” Slavery? Well of course you would have been against it. You would not have made some convenient rationalization! Are you quite sure?

Stood up to the NAZIs did you? (Funny thing is my grandfathers tried to warn the nation of the growing danger and I do not recall your grandfathers participating. Then my grandfathers stood in the minority. But now . . .)

In the story of the war which TE 194.5.4.4/1 told about Kerry, he was a hero valiantly crossing hundreds of yards of enemy fire to save a comrade, not the only skipper to take off down river when the mine went off, leaving his comrade behind, after he fell off due to the abrupt movement of that boat. Any officer might have written the report the way TE 194.5.4.4/1 wrote up the after action report, but none saw it that way, except one officer. (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39889 )

Springer and Franken brought it up again because they need a “war hero” not because they possess special knowledge of the events involved. It appeals to their vanity. Even as a war story it is not particularly interesting. But for them it is important, not for love of Kerry, but for love of themselves.

The entire Vietnam war can be seen as a series of false, or misconstrued reports, misunderstood, misapplied, misdirecting . . . a bureaucratized war which was administered only so that the politicians in Washington would not be accused by other politicians of having “lost Vietnam.”

In the end the politicians in Washington were not even interested in Vietnam the country, only Vietnam the political issue, did not care that a few miles further inland from the DMZ – Laos frontier whole armies were winding there way south. Did not know and did not care . . .

Sometimes one hears it said that the market is a cold uncaring thing and I suppose it is. Yet consider that it was government which had placed 500,000 men in Vietnam, 12% of that number killed, multiples of that number, (four times), of South East Asians were killed, and kept them there for a decade and the whole of the strategy can be summarized as not wanting to be accused of “losing Vietnam.”

A political cover. A pretense. A posturing. A having it both ways. And even now, the lies continue, and History is perverted to serve the ego’s need in the present.

The dishonesty continues today with Springer and Franken. The phrase “discredited Swift Boat Vets” repeated over and over because the Swift Boat Vets dared speak out against a powerful man, a leader of a political faction, who had himself, in the day, accused the vets of “war crimes”.

Springer and Franken thought that Kerry had a “right” to accuse the vets of “war crimes” but think it wrong now for the Swift Boat Vets to tell what they know, which was documented, even by Kerry’s own report.

Note that in the years since, for over thirty five years, the author, TE 194.5.4.4/1, has not come forward. Wonder why?

And if it is said who am I to judge Kerry, he was there I was not, yes, exactly, he was there I was not. I do not personally know if gunning your boat and racing off down the river is a good idea or not. But this is exactly my point. The Swift Boat Vets were there. It behooves us, those of us who were not there, to listen to them, respectfully.

Certainly it is wrong for Springer and Franken to malign them especially as it appears that Springer and Franken malign the Vets not because Springer and Franken have any personal knowledge or insight, some heretofore unspoken reverence for History, but only because Kerry is a member of the elite, to which Springer and Franken belong, and to their Party, their faction, and definitely unlike the middle and working class Swift Boat Vets.

Indeed why do Springer and Franken not also take the hint that no other skipper of a Swift Boat gunned their boats?

But then why is any of this an issue? Why are we not talking about Social Security, balancing the budget, building homes, educating the young?

Why are we being distracted again? History, far from being “settled” now, after having been scrutinized in “disinterested” discussion, becomes another tool of the “fat relentless ego” in its constant struggle for power.

One reason is that Kerry returned home to tell lies about Vietnam. It was not enough for him to simply report that we should leave Vietnam, he had to falsely charge he had witnessed war crimes, even participated in war crimes. And is this not another example of having it both ways? A war hero who committed war crimes? (No, a liar who lied about the war and his record.) What was Kerry protesting but himself: his own lying reports?

Then Springer and Franken complain about the Swift Boat Vet’s TV commercials! I admit that I do not feel this issue as intently as do the Swift Boat Vets. But then have you never noticed a vet wipe a tear from his eye while you looked coolly on? What? Did you think ‘what a cry baby”? Is that how you are? No, I never took Kerry’s charges of “war crimes” seriously, just consider the source, yet I respect the fact that the vets do take it seriously.

And which of us has the correct view? The vets or us in our cool disinterestedness?

And this is how it always has been and always will be. The subjective. See the same issue: Look at the Schiavo CAT scan? Or not? Ignore it?

Accuse the Swift Boat Vets of dishonesty and worse, while ignoring the testimony of the retired Admiral who was on the boat with Kerry and Kerry’s on contemporaneous journal entry nine days later?

Or say you are in favor of “progressive indexing,” (of the rate of INCREASE! of Social Security), before you say it is “pernicious”; why the very idea, the next week, as did Franken. Say we should not have to “bribe” the rich in order to have an old age pension then say the following week that we must pay the rich to keep it “universal” as did Franken.

There is no philosophy that can withstand these twisting demands of the ego. For example, Barbara Boxer the Marin Senator, opposed the Bush forced savings accounts because she said setting up savings accounts would be “too risky”. Just wrap your mind around that: savings is “too risky”. (Franken said he did not even understand what is meant by the words: “forced savings.” Does not understand the issue!)

There are many reasons to oppose Mr. Bush’s vague statements about Social Security reform: because he would create $3 trillion in added debt for a nation that has already fallen in to what just a generation ago would have been unimaginable debt; because the Bush accounts are “instead of” not in “addition to” Social Security; because they do not solve the short fall that Mr. Bush vaguely mentioned, (i.e. 2017 – 2047), when the burden of taxation must fall more and more heavily on the dwindling number of workers who must support the retirees; because Mr. Bush’s vague words never dealt with the fundamental unfairness of a system which draws out of the paychecks of ordinary workers, workers earning a mean average of $16 an hour, whose IQs are on average 100, and thereby forcing them to give their hard earned money to rich retirees, 20% of whom have incomes of over $75,000, whose IQs are above average, (who as a class control 50% of the national income, control over 60% of the financial wealth), and of whom many, most, perhaps 90% of whom, have voted as a class to block development even in our urban areas, forcing the middle and lower income far away by the use of exclusionary zoning, forcing them to long commutes on the highways, burning fossil fuels to get to homes whose mortgages have been raised higher and higher so that to day in California 84% can not afford the median priced home; they have blocked the exploration of oil and gas off our coasts; even blocked wind farms 12 miles from their seashore summer homes; blocked nuclear power for the last 30 years; have for no reason at all blocked progress at every turn, for example they have blocked the mass distribution of educational materials and distance learning to prevent the equitable sharing of knowledge among the people; blocked the entry into the professions with wildly ridiculous requirements such as the requirement that ordinary physicians be able to explain the atomic physics of disease and the molecular interactions of viruses with the membrane of individual cells, as a result our medical schools only can supply half, just 50%, of our new doctors each year, (Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling) thus draining off of the world the best doctors instead of sending out into the world our own doctors to help the world; blocked every attempt at reform that would lesson the control of the state over the ordinary affairs of the people, (for example, preventing the reform of the big city machines which control the payroll of city and state employees whose pay and pensions steadily rise further burdening the people, (BART train drivers earn $109k), the unfairness of which they try to conceal with claims of “progressive taxation” which is simply another of their lies by which they con the people into thinking that the cost of government can be shifted onto “the rich” instead of telling the people the truth that taxes are redistributed onto them through the price mechanism; or by maintaining state control of essential services such as our schools, or our highways and roads so that acting as a class they can use their power to direct roads to their real estate holdings to their private benefit, or directing state control over institutions and foundations whose tax free status, and state supported work, can be used to advance their interests in preference to the interests of the people; but none of this was mentioned or even hinted at by the Marin Senator Boxer. Why?

For reasons that George Orwell would have understood very well: After the revolution the revolutionary becomes the Tory (Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters). Every revolutionary is a Tory in waiting. The state now is victorious. And the supporters of the state are now the protectors of the status quo. The Democrats can not become reformers. They are what needs reforming. They must oppose reform or they will be swept away.

So, this is why the Marin Senator thinks savings accounts would be risky. The Marin Senator thinks it is safer for the people to be dependent on the state, and the state’s taxes on the wages of the workers, even though the ratio of worker to retiree, which was 16 to 1, and is now today 3 to 1, and will become 2 to 1, and will therefore force the workers to pay a larger and larger share to the very people whose mismanagement of the economy and selfishness have forced them into these reduced and dwindling circumstances. ( http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05133/504149.stm)

By all accounts America needs more savings yet the Marin Senator thinks not. And if you think we should give her the benefit of the doubt and think only that she was trying to “preserve” the social commitment to the retirees who are dependent on Social Security, I would ask you why then did she not say these words which you want to put in her mouth?

For example why did she not say she supports individual accounts “in addition to” the regular pension? (as did U. S. Senator Doctor Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan). Because, staying in her role in the passion play, she does not want to “give an inch.” This is not a debate. There are no reasoned arguments. She prefers to posture.

And yet she may be credited with “good faith.” And what does it matter? There is no way to reason, and even time will not allow us to adopt a disinterested view, for history is itself twisted and used to support the ego in its self centered view. There is no religion, no philosophy, no way for us to understand. This is Emptiness.

Ugly American at New Ruskin College

Senator McCain, (McCain see 4-28-05, Lecture Notes: 5-18-05, Lecture Notes: 07-18-05 Protest, Lecture Notes: 07-21-05), was on the television, (of course), explaining that America’s involvement in Iraq will not be complete, a “success”, until he can land at Baghdad airport and drive to the city center in a “ordinary car, you know not armored.”

In other words Americans will just have to go on dying until we remake Baghdad into Phoenix. Again McCain called for more troops.

What an ass.

At the center of the Middle East, a region where political assassination, terror, civil war, are more common than elections, America must go on fighting remaking an entire civilization by force of arms, until that glorious day when Mr. McCain can pick up his rental car at the Baghdad airport and motor into town. He would suffer our young people to go on dying for this, his limited, idiotic vision: the Phoenix Airport.

What an ass.

Yet no one challenged him. He was a POW, did you know? His every pronouncement is treated as if it were issued from his cell in the Hanoi Hilton. Our great leader has spoken. He suffered so much for us! In prison so long! And all for us! Tortured. For us! We owe him so very, very, and very much! Therefore every utterance, no matter how superficial, or incoherent, ridiculously absurd, is assented to because HE was a prisoner of war.

Recently Tom DeLay when asked if a Congressman, (Duke Cunningham), who was discovered living on a government contractor’s yacht, the very same contractor who had recently purchased the Congressman’s home for $700,000 over the market price, might be in breach of “Congressional Ethics”, replied that the Congressman was a “hero,” as if this were proof, an answer, as if Mr. DeLay were making an argument, engaged in moral reasoning, instead of being merely another example of Emptiness.

So the gadfly McCain is allowed to set the goal for America’s involvement in Iraq, to define “success,” and there is nothing that can be done to challenge him. For he is a hero. He was a POW, did you know? There is no reason.

We have a President who has said that he does not want to “impose” a government on Iraq, and instead negotiated this weak political process, where the parliament must be disbanded if “The Constitution” is not approved, to be replaced by another, and another, in an empty desultory plan extending far out over the political horizon into a political wasteland. The President will not even try and speak about the war, discuss the reasons for it, review the facts. Even he has given up, appears to want to ‘distance’ himself.

And our young people in Iraq are abandoned. Led by their Commander In Chief who refused to take responsibility for bringing the conflict to a resolution; BY OUR ACTS ALONE. Says he did not want to “impose.” Now the resolution to the conflict is entirely in the hands of the Iraqi parliament which is to be dissolved. Possibly “The Constitution” will be approved, possibly it will not be approved. No one knows. Its fate is to be decided by “the voters” of any three of the 18 provinces.

Did I say its fate? Well, yes, and the fate of our young people. Though I suppose better by them, whoever they are than by McCain. And we have gadflies like McCain setting our goal as one of turning Baghdad into Phoenix. And no one objects. He was a POW, did you know?

And when I sit down on the sidewalk in front of the KQED building in a few days, to complete my protest, there will be before me this uniform blur of liars, fools, idiots.

Top to bottom.

Crawling around on the bottom the likes of Scott (“now he probably thinks that I work for the J.D.L.”) Bobro, or that clerk at KellyFinancialServices.com who visited this site several times before calling me and asking about my “status.” And above them the people who manipulated Scott Bobro, and Frank Blaha, and Dean Sotos; the Don Imus’ and Michael Weiners; the rich and powerful.

And above them, at the top of the social pyramid of folly, George Bush and John McCain.

I had thought we were in this together. All citizens of the Republic. McCain’s grandfather and my grandfather had fought together. We are both Republicans.

Then came his betrayal: McCain, appearing on the Imus show, thought it a good joke to reference this web site. A wink at Don Imus. As if to say, ‘Good for you Don . . . good work . . . you destroyed that man. Congradulations.’ One egotist to another. This was after Senator Hatch appeared on the Imus show and said: “I have heard what you do to some of your listeners.” Another egotist to another. (see also William Bennett’s butt boy: “I think they called it . . . Operation Spear . . . or something like that.” see Army Navy Club Number 43 )

And that McCain and Don Imus and I are all three of us “White males” and that because of this fact we are all supposed to be part of the same ‘club’ only adds a little irony to the farce.

A uniform blur of idiocy. And that I have held out this long on hope, what is that but more idiocy? I had believed in the goodness of ordinary people. Then I had still thought that Senators, The President of the United States, they will not abide injustice! A fool. But I can not stand alone. If Presidents and Senators will join in then how can anyone stand?

How can any of you stand? If you will deny me justice how can you claim justice? When the next bio-attack comes, and you are murdered in your millions, tens of millions, how will you demand justice, you who have lived so unjustly, rejoiced in your injustice, gloated and smirked in your “viciousness”? (“Why do they hate us?”)